Pain Killers (29 page)

“I like the water-bed-next-to-the-desk arrangement,” I said, scooping up a batch of canceled checks and pre-stamped U-Serve money orders. “But the bookkeeping’s a little shaky.”

The top drawer, when I tugged it open, spilled a small library of Thai takeout flyers. The drawer beneath was stuffed with sanctioned twelve-step booklets, mixed with homemade pamphlets containing the reverend’s inspirational thoughts and sermons. The pamphlets were hand-assembled, folded-over pages copied on a Xerox machine that needed toner and hand-stapled on the crease. The first pamphlet I grabbed featured a sketch of a long-haired girl with one hand propped on the wall over a toilet, one hand shoved in her mouth. Over the picture was a line of Gothic script that I read to Tina: ‘The Second Word in Heaven Is Heave.’”

Tina stiffened. “That one’s about bulimia. Most of the girls have eating disorders. There’s some wing of OA in the Valley that donates bed and board for Christian overeaters.”

“Whatever helps.”

Tina slammed the bottom drawer shut. “This is pointless. We need his computer for addresses.”

“So the rev cranks out white power porn and born-again jerk-off fodder. I still don’t get exactly what business Zell did with him.”

“I’m pretty sure it had to do with distribution.”

“Of course. Zell’s a big Jew.”

Tina gave me a funny look.

“It’s an expression,” I said. “I heard it from Mama Mendel, mother of Solly Mendel, the yarmulke king…. Long story.”

“You do look good in kosher,” she said, smiling.

“Enough, okay? Let me think. We already found out Harry Zell’s son is a card-carrying star of ALS. It’s no stretch to imagine Daddy bankrolling white supremacist sex-ertainment. Maybe he sells it to the Aryans exclusive.”

“What if Bernstein’s just in with the Aryans to do family business?”

“In that case I hope those swastikas on his neck wash off.”

“He can wear a tallith.”

“How do you know about talliths?”

“Client wanted a girl to dress up.”

“Like a rabbi?”

“Cantor. He wanted her to sing. One of the girls knew ‘Hava Nagila’ from interfaith camp.”

“You know, I’m dying to find out more about your thing with Reverend D. But I’m dying even more to know about your friend Bernstein. He did everything but kiss Mengele’s ring when he met him. And Mengele shined him on. That’s what doesn’t figure. You look at the old fuck for two minutes, it’s obvious he’s this craven, narcissistic, dried-up praise sponge.”

Tina shrugged. “Did you forget? Bernstein is Jewish.”

“I didn’t forget, but in prison Jews are white and whites stick together.”

“Maybe in prison, but not in concentration camps. Think about it,” Tina said. “Mengele came from eugenics. Caucasian or not, at Auschwitz, Jews weren’t even considered human.”

“I love that you know this stuff,” I told her, and meant it. “I’m crazy about your looks, and your body, too. But I really fucking love you for your brains.”

“You better,” she said, but I could tell she liked hearing it.

I dug into the pile and plucked out another pamphlet. In this one centurions whipped Jesus while he held up a Holy Bible. A thought balloon over his head said, “The Jew calls this a dirty book!” Historical Jew-hate, disturbing as it was, was at least history. The sight of anti-Semitic literature as modern as
Gossip Girl
triggered a much more visceral fear. Not because it could happen here, but because it was happening.

An involuntary shudder made my lip twitch. “Business or no business, it’s one thing for a Jewish dad to have a son in San Quentin, it’s another to have him join a white prison gang and drink the Third Reich Kool-Aid.”

“Otherwise known as Powdered Hitler,” said Tina, “but Zell has
two
sons.” She kicked me in the shin. “What about brother Davey? Zell could be paying Mengele to give the poor kid a jaw. I hate to say it, but you probably do get mad scalpel skills when you practice on living flesh instead of cadavers.”

“That would mean Mengele takes money from a Jew.”

“Oh, please,” said Tina, “money’s green, no matter who touches it.”

“Color me naïve,” I sighed, and settled back to watch Tina pick a nurse’s uniform off a rolling rack full of them. NANCY was stitched over the left breast.

“Don’t tell me, he’s running a home health care service, too?”

“That’s one way to describe it. Nurses are the number-one fantasy.”

A shoe rack, like you’d find in a bowling alley, took up most of the wall behind the uniforms. Half the rack was full of nursing shoes. I stepped over and picked a pair at random. The size was shocking. Eighteen, triple E.

“Who’s this for, Nurse Shaq?”

“Some of the T-girls run big. You’d be surprised at the special requests.”

“I doubt it.” Then something occurred to me. “I wonder why Davey didn’t honk on being Bernstein’s brother. Having a bro who’s a wheel in the Aryans could make life easy.”

Tina stopped. “Maybe Davey is the modest type.”

“Or maybe Davey and his dad weren’t so sure Mengele didn’t care who touched his money. Nazi doctors viewed Gypsies and Jews as two-legged tumors. So maybe they figured Mengele might accidentally forget to sterilize his instruments if he knew he was transplanting a jaw into a Jewish face. That’s a pretty big reason to conceal Bernstein and Davey’s fraternal bond. I’m gonna be looking over my shoulder till we figure out if Mengele and Zell are partners or enemies.”

“Don’t drive yourself crazy; plenty of people are both.”

Tina hung the nurse wear back up and plucked a gingham dress off the rack. The collar was high and lacy and it buttoned up to the chin, in the pervy-wholesome fashion favored by schoolmarms in Westerns. “So how’s your daughter, by the way?”

“What makes you ask about Lola? The schoolmarm dress?” It was a look I never got. “She’s over her granny phase. Which I kind of miss. I had lunch with her a month ago and she showed up in a body stocking and hoodie. One of her friends saw us. Later she asked Lola what it was like dating a cool old nerd.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t even like talking about her in a place like this. We should go.”

“Fine. We can leave now if you want.” Tina rehung the gingham and selected a white leather coat with a fur collar. Then she put that back and grabbed a tight gray coat that buttoned from the ankles up. It fit like it was happy to be there. “The thing is, we’re fucked without the computer. We’re gonna have to depend on Cathy to remember where Mengele lived. Come on.”

“Where to?”

“Well,” she said, “Reverend D calls it the guest bedroom, but that’s kind of a stretch.”

Upstairs, I saw what Tina meant about the bedroom. We walked in on three female residents. The trio were all in ratty panties, smoking crystal from a glass-bulbed pipe and sprawled on a stained shag carpet. It was hard to say what the original color might have been. The air had a chemical tinge. From the doorway, the girls seemed to be marooned on an island of Romilar DM bottles, empty forty-ounce Cobras, spilled-over ashtrays, odd bits of circuitry and shiny metal parts and cereal bowls brimming with yellow-gold liquid.

“Tell me that’s apple juice,” I said.

“You pee, you lose your turn,” Tina explained. “The good news, on crank you don’t pee much. You forget.”

“It’s the little things,” I said.

Sheets had been tacked over the windows and a “Viva Viagra” commercial played on the unwatched fifty-inch flat-screen propped against a wall with the sound off. A few mattresses, minus sheets, were shoved in a corner. Beside the leaning TV stood a wooden podium with CHRISTIAN LOVE hand-stenciled on the front and a red Bible on it. None of the tweakerettes so much as noticed when we entered. Two of the young ladies, one Latina and one black, fought lethargically over the glass stem. “Pipe is mines, bitch.” “Bullshit. I will kick your funky black ass right now.” You had the feeling they’d been arguing for five years.

A few crumbs spilled from a baggy on a cracked dinner plate between them. But neither appeared energetic enough to do more than bicker. The Latina, who might have been under thirty if she lied on her driver’s license, owned a pair of impossibly firm torpedo breasts. They stuck straight out, titanium solid and far too large for the popsicle stick Darfur rib cage saddled with the task of supporting them. It occurred to me that maybe she couldn’t stand up. She’d just have to loll on the ground, victim of crank and gravity, until somebody hauled her off or she smoked herself down to nothing, leaving only those twin towers and a pair of cracked lips to show she ever existed. The black crank fanatic trying to snatch the pipe was just as sucked up, but a foot taller, with deep-set eyes and a big crucifix dangling between her much daintier bosoms. The way Jesus dangled in her cleavage, it looked like He was dying to stretch out his arms on the cross and squeeze her nipples. She kept crying,
“Mine mine mine, mine mine mine,”
as if she’d forgotten what the word meant or how to stop repeating it.

“Fucking perfect,” Tina said after we took in the tableau. That’s when the third girl, the white one, noticed us, and Tina pointed. “That’s her.”

Cathy was rocking on her side, carpet fetal, but sat up fast. Still rocking, she gazed at us with the slack-jawed, cracked-glass stare of an alien abductee.

“Psychotic?” I wondered out loud.

“On a good day,” Tina said. “Crank does that.”

Tina turned on the light, and all three girls skittered in place like roaches on glue. In the one-hundred-watt glare, I could make out the red tide of tiny bumps up and down Cathy’s arms and legs. I stepped back instinctively, fearing contact. “Are those fleabites?”

“Not even,” Tina replied. “Crank does that, too. You get enough of that shit in your system, it finds a way to get back out.”

The piles of clothes and makeup scattered around the room made me think of a plane crash. But it was hard to say if there were any survivors.

Cathy stuck her thumb in her mouth and scooted backward. I noticed something shiny, electronic and broken on the carpet behind her. Something with its innards plucked out and arranged according to a system that probably made sense if you’d been up for three days, really concentrating. Gink work. The idea, generally sparked when all circuits were firing, was to take something apart, figure out how it works and put it back together—which no one since the invention of going without sleep had ever done. Cops trawling for tweakers pull over and put their vests on when they spot a driveway full of engine parts.

Tina kneeled and picked up the silver tray. “Well, now we’re fucked,” she said. Somehow, in her hands, the thing more resembled what it was: the gutted husk of a laptop, piled with colorful bits of circuit and wire that once made it possible to Google “methedrine + psychosis.” “The rev had all his addresses in his PowerBook.”

“And there’s no backup?”

Tina rattled a few of the larger pieces around, retrieving a black box the size of a pack of Camel straights. A scissored USB cord dangled from it, still plugged in. Tina sighed. “External hard drive.” She held the box to the light to show me the holes where it had been pierced clean through. They formed a perfect cross.

“It was Satan!” Cathy screamed. Her eyes jittered wildly in their sockets.

“He must have used power tools,” Tina said.

“He was in the computer! I saw his face. His eyes were words. The screen was
bleeding
!”

Suddenly she leaped to her feet, flailing, like somebody trying to climb air. Then she dropped, both hands scratching frantically at the red letters spelling SAVIN’ IT FOR JC over the crotch of her formerly white panties. The panties rode low, tragic and saggy beneath the protruding plates of her pelvis. Somehow—maybe it was the bagged-out JC undies—her body gave the impression of having been recently plump.

“The screen was
bleeding
!
Tell them!
” Cathy screamed to the pair on the carpet, who were still feuding in desultory fashion over the next hit. “Roxie,
tell
her…La-
tee
-sha!
Help me!
”

“Huh?”

Roxie, the one with breasts that made me think of armor-piercing depleted uranium shells, amassed the energy to turn her head. When she did, Lateesha snatched the pipe out of her hands. She fished a questionable chunk out of her own thong, jammed it in the business end of her stem and tried to light it. Before Lateesha could catch a flame, Tina leaped up again and kicked the pipe out of her mouth. It hit the wall and cracked, scattering speed crumbs. Lateesha let out a high-pitched
reee-owwww,
like a feral cat with a nail in its eye, and all three girls dove for the drugs at once.

Tina broke into the scrum and grabbed Cathy by the hair, leaving the other two to salvage what high they could from the shattered glass.

I helped Tina get our target out of the room. In the hall, she propped her against a wall and slapped her. “Cathy, stop being such a tweaker!” Tina had a way of saying this kind of thing with genuine tenderness. She wanted to strangle the girl but she’d also
been
her. And she remembered. Her own life made her kindness genuine. Not for the first time, it occurred to me how lucky I was. Lots of guys wanted nice girls. I had a woman who’d been as far down the chemical bad behavior ladder as I’d been. Farther, in Tina’s case, since I’d never murdered a spouse or added a side-dish of eating disorder. I didn’t judge her, she didn’t judge me. She wasn’t nice, but she was knowing. Which made me much more comfortable. I didn’t do well with nice. I never knew what to do with it.

Cathy rested her head on Tina’s shoulder. Love was a demented negotiation. Or maybe we just find people demented the same way we are—so as not to feel…demented. Or—
Shut the fuck up!
Clearly, I’d breathed in some eau de methedrine. But it only made me think
more,
not better, the way speed always did.

Cathy began to vibrate. I watched Tina stroke the shaking girl’s face. She rocked her and murmured, “It’s okay,” over and over, whispering to the black roots of fried blond rat’s nest. Cathy might have been sixteen or forty-six, depending. But when Tina held her she was five.